Why isn’t the board asking questions?

THE BBC’s handling of the Bashir scandal is full of unanswered questions. One of the biggest is: ‘Who’s watching what the BBC bosses are up to?’

When a private company goes off the rails, the shareholders can march in and demand a halt. The closest we have to that with the BBC is the board.

This has 14 members, four of them the corporation’s topmost bosses, the rest outsiders. Academics, bankers, lawyers and media bigwigs. Three are knights, one a dame, and their job is to hold the executives to account.

So what do these outsiders make of the fact that board member, BBC director-general Tim Davie, has spent more than £150,000 to keep 3,000 documents linked to Martin Bashir’s infamous interview with Princess Diana under wraps?

At an information tribunal last year, Judge Brian Kennedy KC made his judgment of the BBC’s conduct clear, registering ‘serious concern’. I immediately sent a copy to all ten outsider board members. The response? Absolute silence.

This is not the first time the board has remained markedly quiet on the subject. On April 25, 1996, the then board of governors were summoned to a meeting at Broadcasting House – days after The Mail on Sunday had reported how Bashir had deployed his forged bank statements to secure his interview with the Princess.

The board knew, then, that something unseemly had happened. They didn’t know, however, that four days earlier BBC bosses had reviewed the position in secret and determined a cynical course of action to cover up Bashir’s actions.

‘The Diana story is probably dead – unless (her brother Charles) Spencer talks’, then-BBC executive Anne Sloman wrote in a memo.

Briefing the board in that Thursday meeting was Lord Hall, later to become BBC director-general. He knew that Bashir had lied repeatedly about the forgeries, but, told the members that Bashir was ‘honest and an honourable man’. The board swallowed his story, whole.

Had just one member raised searching questions, the cover-up might have crumbled. History could have been different.

Many who attended that meeting 28 years ago are no longer alive – but one of them certainly is. Sir Richard Eyre, 80, is a film director festooned with honours.

When the Dyson Report was published in 2021, Sir Richard expressed his deep regret that he and the rest of the board had been lied to. He said Lord Hall saw them as nothing more than ‘ineffectual, ignorant fools’.

Sir Richard is well informed on the current scandal. He was invited to direct the two episodes of Netflix series The Crown which cover Bashir’s activities. And while he doesn’t directly criticise the BBC now, he does urge current board members to reflect on what happened all those years ago.

So should they demand an inquiry? If so, the BBC’s incoming chairman, the veteran media executive Samir Shah, 72, will at least know his way around the dark corners of New Broadcasting House.

From 1987 to 1998, including that key period when Bashir preyed on Princess Diana, Mr Shah was very close to the top of the BBC. In fact, he was Lord Hall’s deputy.